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                                                                                NOBEL PRIZE, Page 61

Strike Against Racism


Guatemala's Rigoberta Menchu is honored for reminding the world
that America's Indians are still persecuted

By BRUCE W. NELAN -- With reporting by Susan Parker/Guatemala
City


    "The celebration of Columbus is for us an insult."

    -- Rigoberta Menchu


    Norway's Nobel Committee has never been reluctant to use
the immense prestige of its Peace Prize to make a political
point. Over the years it has found timely reason to honor such
powerful figures as Martin Luther King Jr., Willy Brandt, Lech
Walesa and Bishop Desmond Tutu. Few of those were more
calculatedly controversial than this year's Nobel Peace
laureate, Rigoberta Menchu. The award to the 33-year-old
Guatemalan Indian-rights activist was announced in the week
marking the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival
in the New World.

    News of the award reached Menchu in San Marcos, where she
had been coordinating opposition to the quincentennial
celebration. For the past two years, she has been a leading
member of the campaign -- ultimately successful -- to have the
U.N. designate 1993 as the International Year for Indigenous
Populations. A Mayan of the Quiche group from northwestern
Guatemala, she moved to Mexico in 1981, after her father, mother
and a brother were killed by government security forces. "I only
wish that my parents could have been present," she said last
week.

    Menchu was selected for the $1.2 million prize, the
committee said, "in recognition of her work for social justice
and ethno-cultural reconciliation." Amid the "large-scale
repression of Indian peoples" in Guatemala, she plays a
"prominent part as an advocate of native rights." Francis
Sejersted, the chairman, said the committee was "aware that this
is a somewhat controversial prize." The fact that it came during
the quincentennial "was not a coincidence," he said, "but it was
not the only factor."

    Menchu says she will use the prize money to set up a
foundation in her father's name to defend the rights of
indigenous people. "The only thing I wish for is freedom for
Indians wherever they are," she says. "As the end of the 20th
century approaches, we hope that our continent will be
pluralistic."

    Born in poverty, uneducated, Menchu became a farm laborer
as a small child, tending corn and beans on her parents' tiny
plot and traveling with them to the south to work on coffee,
cotton and sugar plantations. She did not even learn to speak
Spanish until she was 20. But the world learned her story with
the 1983 publication of her autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchu,
which eventually appeared in 11 languages. It tells of Quiche
life in the mountains and the domination of the Indians, who
make up 60% of the population, by the minority Ladinos, mostly
the descendants of the European colonists. Her book recounts,
in horrifying detail, the torture and death of family members.

    Her father, Vicente, was one of the early underground
organizers of an agrarian trade union called the Peasant Unity
Committee. His 16-year-old son was seized by security troops,
flayed and publicly burned. In January 1980, when Vicente and
some of his comrades occupied the Spanish embassy in Guatemala
City to call attention to their grievances, police stormed the
building. The embassy caught fire, and the demonstrators burned
to death.

    A few weeks later, soldiers dragged Menchu's mother away,
held her captive and raped her repeatedly. After torturing her,
they left her under a tree to die of her wounds. Menchu tried
to live in hiding but soon had to flee the country; two of her
sisters went to the mountains to join guerrilla forces there.
More than 120,000 people have been killed in the 30-year
rebellion against Guatemala's successive repressive governments.
Security forces are blamed for as many as 50,000 deaths, mostly
highland Indians, during the counterinsurgency campaigns of the
1980s.

    Menchu has supported united front organizations in
Guatemala as well as her father's Peasant Unity Committee but
has neither backed nor denounced the rebels and their use of
violence. Before the prize was announced, a military spokesman
argued that giving it to her ``would be a political victory for
the guerrillas." On the contrary, wrote columnist Alfonso
Portillo in the daily Siglo 21, "she makes those who are guided
by hate, racism, selfishness and stupidity tremble."

    The Nobel Committee considered the possibility that it
might seem to be honoring an advocate of guerrilla warfare but
rejected the idea. Sejersted said the panel had left "no leaf
unturned" in investigating her career. He did not claim that
every single action she had ever taken was pacific, but "it is
our clear conclusion that her long-term goal is peace."

    That goal is not yet within reach in Guatemala. Its
current government and the guerrillas have been talking for 18
months in search of a negotiated settlement. But a recent report
from the Roman Catholic human-rights office charges that the
government "continues to demonstrate the political tradition of
terror." Activists in civil rights and grass-roots organizations
are still receiving death threats, and in the first six months
of this year there were 253 political assassinations. Menchu
was only visiting the country last week. She now must decide
whether to try to live there.